The downtown NY 'Scene': Jeannette Montgomery Barron

At the mythic origin of the downtown scene, there was Andy Warhol, Bianca Jagger, and Jean-Michel Basquiat. And photographer Jeannette Montgomery Barron was there too -- photographing the superstars, the wannabes, and the demigods in-between. In 1981, when Barron was her mid-twenties, she began capturing the explosive creative energy in SoHo and the East Village. She started with a portrait of the artist Francesco Clemente. "I was a bit naïve—taking everyone and everything at face value,” says Barron. “In a way, New York was a bit naïve too, just coming out of the recession but before the art boom that is now so famously remembered." At the time, scheduling a portrait session with Andy Warhol was as simple as a single call—he had the number to The Factory listed in the phone book. Throughout her years of work photographing the natives of downtown New York, Barron became a friend a social fixture herself – and her documentation of the period has been widely exhibited and collected since. Now, Powerhouse Books releases Scene, a collection of Barron’s iconic downtown portraits – including those of David Salle, Cindy Sherman, and Willem Dafoe -- and the ClampArt gallery in New York will host an exhibition of her prints in May. See the highlights, with Barron’s own captions.